Analysis on Empathy-Inducing Effect Brought by Haiku

摘要

In this paper, we discuss the issue of empathy-inducing effect brought by Japanese Haiku, regarded as the world-shortest poetry. Its condensed form of word combination sometimes arouses deep impression and empathy in readers. Its possibilities as communication media would be enhanced in multimedia contexts, when considering educational purpose or cross-cultural interchanges. An experimental result is shown for evaluating multimedia effect on combined presentation of a CG drawing and its associated haiku in English. We confirmed that various aspects of visual impression and empathy were sometimes enhanced with certain haiku text as linguistic stimuli, compared with the condition of viewing a CG drawing only. The reason of raised empathy was analyzed from the various aspects of the content provided by the associated haiku text complementary for the drawing. Moreover, we examined the effects of poetic styles on subjects' empathy, using Japanese prose and conventional haiku style (5-7-5 syllabic rhyme), both of them were translated from the same haiku in English.